Day 10 – May 9
There’s very little to note on the school front today. I had no classes in the morning, but had collected the 1B notebooks and so spent an hour or so marking the exercise I had asked them to do. About 6 out of a class of 30 had done it well. Since I’ve just started working with them, it’s hard to tell if it was a low level of English or just poor explanations that caused the problems. The 1A class, however, seems to be doing much better and is a much more attentive class as well. We’ll see what happens in Week 2.
I then spent about 90 minutes stamping and dedicating the donated dictionaries. I will start using them with the classes next week, as we’ll be doing lessons on how to use a dictionary. Timely!
I left a bit early today to go to town to submit my OISE reports. However, on arrival I was disappointed to find that there was no electricity at the internet café today (despite it being on everywhere else). They told me that it could come back on at any time, so I killed about an hour walking around, and then another 30 minutes at a nearby café, but no luck. I finally had to give up around 4:30pm so that I could get home before dark. I will try again on Sunday or Monday.
Friday, May 9, 2008
Thursday, May 8, 2008
Five periods of English. Or six. Or nine.
Day 9 – May 8
Classes went off without anything noteworthy today, which is to say they went well. In the staffroom, I had the misfortunate of witnessing more physical punishment as a student was made to kneel on the concrete floor by the door for about 30 minutes. Apparently, he was a truant and had only been to school 4 or 5 days since the academic year had started in January. I can’t see how physical punishment will help the student or make him want to come to school any more, however.
At break time today, I was heading to the washrooms (outhouses at the far end of the school ground) and I saw a circle of girls involved in a lively game of some sort. They were in a big circle and it looked as if they were tossing a ball around the ring. As I got closer, however, I noticed that it wasn’t a ball at all, but a soft-ball-sized rock, and they had about 3 or 4 of them going around the circle at various points. I guess the fun of it all was not to drop the rock as it was being tossed to you. After smiling at the enormous fun they were having with all of this, I couldn’t help but think about the odds of seeing a bunch of Canadian high school girls at lunch in a circle, tossing rocks to each other. It was one of those things that really make you realize what a different country it is that you’re in.
I’ve mentioned already my amazement at a teaching staff that seems to require the principal to physically be at the school in order to do their duties properly. Today I was equally amazed at another oversight of professionalism. I was starting to look ahead to my two weeks teaching the Form II students, and had begun to draw a rough chart on a piece of paper to plan out my lessons. I went to look at the timetable (a large piece of green construction paper with a hand-drawn table on it) to count the classes and noticed an incredible discrepancy: the 2A class was scheduled for 6 periods of English, the 2B class was scheduled for 5 periods of English, and the 2C class was scheduled for a whopping 9 periods of English! How could one class be getting almost twice as much English instruction as one of the other ones? Had nobody noticed this difference?
I brought this discrepancy to the attention of the headmaster in the form of a question as to why there was such a difference between the 2B and 2C class. He seemed equally surprised and came over to look. So I proceeded to show him all the differences and he looked at the time table and did his own math.
“We must correct this,” he said, and he took my pen and started to cross out a few lessons for the 2C class and add a lesson for the 2B, as the standard number of periods of English for Form II is six. So in short work the error had been rectified, but I was left there in amazement at the fact that they had been teaching following this timetable since the beginning of the school year in January. How was it possible that no one, especially the English teacher who has to teach these classes, noticed this huge error? I suppose you could perhaps chalk it up to the oversight of teachers who are rarely teaching their classes anyway.
One thing which is a bit annoying, but over which I have little control is late students. I often begin a class and have a student or two walk in 5 or 10 minutes late. There’s not much I can do because there are no such thing as daily class lists or attendance records (as far as I know) and the same thing has occurred in some of the other classes that I’ve observed. Today in the 1A class, I had the students working on an exercise and I noticed that one student at the back didn’t have a notebook open on his desk. When I approached him and asked him about it, he said that he was from the 1B class. “Aren’t you supposed to be doing something in your own class?” I asked. He didn’t really have an answer, so I sent him back to his proper classroom.
Controlling the coming and going of students is also difficult for one other embarrassing reason: most of the students look remarkably the same. I know all that business about “cross-cultural identification.” People asked me about that when I was in Japan, but I never really had that problem in Japan – I never really found that all the students looked the same. Here, however, it really is remarkable. With few exceptions, the students all have the same dark skin colour, most are slim, the girls (more than the boys) are of similar height, and all of them, boys and girls, have hair cut almost right down to the scalp. In fact, the girls here aren’t allowed to grow their hair until after they have graduated from high school. This, along with the fact that they all have smooth skin and narrow faces makes it very difficult to tell them apart, and even sometimes to tell if a student is a boy or a girl. Occasionally, I have to take a quick glance down to see if they are wearing a skirt or pants to tell the difference. It’s embarrassing to admit, but you can’t really understand until you have 200 of them in front of you.
Well, tomorrow finishes my first week of teaching. Slowly, especially with the 1A class, the students seem to be getting used to my style of teaching, as well as to the fact that English class doesn’t just have to be blackboard lecture and note-taking. It’s a shame that I’ll only have one more week with them after tomorrow.
Classes went off without anything noteworthy today, which is to say they went well. In the staffroom, I had the misfortunate of witnessing more physical punishment as a student was made to kneel on the concrete floor by the door for about 30 minutes. Apparently, he was a truant and had only been to school 4 or 5 days since the academic year had started in January. I can’t see how physical punishment will help the student or make him want to come to school any more, however.
At break time today, I was heading to the washrooms (outhouses at the far end of the school ground) and I saw a circle of girls involved in a lively game of some sort. They were in a big circle and it looked as if they were tossing a ball around the ring. As I got closer, however, I noticed that it wasn’t a ball at all, but a soft-ball-sized rock, and they had about 3 or 4 of them going around the circle at various points. I guess the fun of it all was not to drop the rock as it was being tossed to you. After smiling at the enormous fun they were having with all of this, I couldn’t help but think about the odds of seeing a bunch of Canadian high school girls at lunch in a circle, tossing rocks to each other. It was one of those things that really make you realize what a different country it is that you’re in.
I’ve mentioned already my amazement at a teaching staff that seems to require the principal to physically be at the school in order to do their duties properly. Today I was equally amazed at another oversight of professionalism. I was starting to look ahead to my two weeks teaching the Form II students, and had begun to draw a rough chart on a piece of paper to plan out my lessons. I went to look at the timetable (a large piece of green construction paper with a hand-drawn table on it) to count the classes and noticed an incredible discrepancy: the 2A class was scheduled for 6 periods of English, the 2B class was scheduled for 5 periods of English, and the 2C class was scheduled for a whopping 9 periods of English! How could one class be getting almost twice as much English instruction as one of the other ones? Had nobody noticed this difference?
I brought this discrepancy to the attention of the headmaster in the form of a question as to why there was such a difference between the 2B and 2C class. He seemed equally surprised and came over to look. So I proceeded to show him all the differences and he looked at the time table and did his own math.
“We must correct this,” he said, and he took my pen and started to cross out a few lessons for the 2C class and add a lesson for the 2B, as the standard number of periods of English for Form II is six. So in short work the error had been rectified, but I was left there in amazement at the fact that they had been teaching following this timetable since the beginning of the school year in January. How was it possible that no one, especially the English teacher who has to teach these classes, noticed this huge error? I suppose you could perhaps chalk it up to the oversight of teachers who are rarely teaching their classes anyway.
One thing which is a bit annoying, but over which I have little control is late students. I often begin a class and have a student or two walk in 5 or 10 minutes late. There’s not much I can do because there are no such thing as daily class lists or attendance records (as far as I know) and the same thing has occurred in some of the other classes that I’ve observed. Today in the 1A class, I had the students working on an exercise and I noticed that one student at the back didn’t have a notebook open on his desk. When I approached him and asked him about it, he said that he was from the 1B class. “Aren’t you supposed to be doing something in your own class?” I asked. He didn’t really have an answer, so I sent him back to his proper classroom.
Controlling the coming and going of students is also difficult for one other embarrassing reason: most of the students look remarkably the same. I know all that business about “cross-cultural identification.” People asked me about that when I was in Japan, but I never really had that problem in Japan – I never really found that all the students looked the same. Here, however, it really is remarkable. With few exceptions, the students all have the same dark skin colour, most are slim, the girls (more than the boys) are of similar height, and all of them, boys and girls, have hair cut almost right down to the scalp. In fact, the girls here aren’t allowed to grow their hair until after they have graduated from high school. This, along with the fact that they all have smooth skin and narrow faces makes it very difficult to tell them apart, and even sometimes to tell if a student is a boy or a girl. Occasionally, I have to take a quick glance down to see if they are wearing a skirt or pants to tell the difference. It’s embarrassing to admit, but you can’t really understand until you have 200 of them in front of you.
Well, tomorrow finishes my first week of teaching. Slowly, especially with the 1A class, the students seem to be getting used to my style of teaching, as well as to the fact that English class doesn’t just have to be blackboard lecture and note-taking. It’s a shame that I’ll only have one more week with them after tomorrow.
Wednesday, May 7, 2008
How the present simple can bring on God's wrath
Day 8 – May 7
The mornings are getting nicer and nicer and today we had sunshine as we went to school. It’s nice simply because there’s a better chance that our bus will take us most or all of the way to school and we won’t have to walk down any muddy road. But even there, with the rain dropping off the roads are drier and much more passable.
Today the headmaster was at the school for the entire day, and as he had predicted, it made a noticeable difference in the behaviour of the teachers. The were suddenly in class when they were supposed to be, there was quiet throughout the school during class time instead of student chatter, and things just ran a lot smoother in general. It’s too bad it’s not like that more often. It seems he often has things to do in town. Where in Canada a principal could simply send off a fax or a letter in the mail, here, without those conveniences, the principal must do the work personally, and as we are located in the countryside, he spends a lot of time going back and forth.
Today as I came back from teaching my first class the other teachers were sitting at their desks around the edges of the staffroom, with fairly serious looks on their faces. In the centre on the floor there was a student with a grimace on his face. He was just getting up as I walked in and quickly left. I wasn’t sure what had happened, but given the faces around the room and the stick on the floor, I guessed that some kind of punishment had been carried out – one that wouldn’t fly at all in Canada. Later, when I asked the headmaster about what happened, he told me that the boy had come to school in shoes that are not part of the uniform. It wasn’t the first time it had happened and he had been told repeatedly before not to wear the shoes to school. On top of that, he was a bit of a troublemaker of a kid and had beat up a smaller student the day before. So I asked what happened, and the headmaster said that he had told the student to hand over the offending shoes. The student refused.
“What happened next?” I asked. He replied that he had had to take the shoes from the student.
“How did you get them?” I asked.
“By force,” was the reply. I pressed a bit further, but he had no more to add, so I had to leave it at that. It’s sad to think that that happens here, and I would hate to think that the stick had had some involvement, but it probably did. I’m glad at least that I didn’t have to witness it.
On a lighter note, in my second class a student told me that God would probably kill me. Today I was teaching the use of the present simple to talk about daily routines, and I started off by talking a little bit about my daily routine in Canada. When I had finished, I asked if they had any questions for me. There was a short pause before one slim girl in the front row put her and up and said, “You don’t pray?” I explained that in Canada, some people pray every day and some people don’t, and that I was one of those who don’t. This shocked a lot of the students.
She looked up, smiled a little, and then said, “God might kill you.” She wasn’t damning me or anything like that. She laughed, I laughed, and then the class laughed. It was just a funny situation, and definitely a teachable moment about religion in culture.
I am now in possession of a syllabus for Form I-IV English. It’s a booklet in chart format that is basically a simplified version of the curriculum. It is created by the Ministry of Education to help teachers plan their courses, and is likely a quite necessary tool since a great number of them are like the English teachers at my school – nothing more than high school graduates with no education training whatsoever. The chart format has a lot of the headings that we would be familiar with: objectives, structure, outcome expectations, teaching strategies, assessment strategies, expected periods per topic, etc. Despite that, however, the actual content listed under those headings is extremely rudimentary and of very little value. Still, it probably helps a little in setting the teachers who have no clue on the right track.
In any case, it will at least give me a little bit of an idea of what I should be teaching the kids, which is more than what the teachers have been doing!
The mornings are getting nicer and nicer and today we had sunshine as we went to school. It’s nice simply because there’s a better chance that our bus will take us most or all of the way to school and we won’t have to walk down any muddy road. But even there, with the rain dropping off the roads are drier and much more passable.
Today the headmaster was at the school for the entire day, and as he had predicted, it made a noticeable difference in the behaviour of the teachers. The were suddenly in class when they were supposed to be, there was quiet throughout the school during class time instead of student chatter, and things just ran a lot smoother in general. It’s too bad it’s not like that more often. It seems he often has things to do in town. Where in Canada a principal could simply send off a fax or a letter in the mail, here, without those conveniences, the principal must do the work personally, and as we are located in the countryside, he spends a lot of time going back and forth.
Today as I came back from teaching my first class the other teachers were sitting at their desks around the edges of the staffroom, with fairly serious looks on their faces. In the centre on the floor there was a student with a grimace on his face. He was just getting up as I walked in and quickly left. I wasn’t sure what had happened, but given the faces around the room and the stick on the floor, I guessed that some kind of punishment had been carried out – one that wouldn’t fly at all in Canada. Later, when I asked the headmaster about what happened, he told me that the boy had come to school in shoes that are not part of the uniform. It wasn’t the first time it had happened and he had been told repeatedly before not to wear the shoes to school. On top of that, he was a bit of a troublemaker of a kid and had beat up a smaller student the day before. So I asked what happened, and the headmaster said that he had told the student to hand over the offending shoes. The student refused.
“What happened next?” I asked. He replied that he had had to take the shoes from the student.
“How did you get them?” I asked.
“By force,” was the reply. I pressed a bit further, but he had no more to add, so I had to leave it at that. It’s sad to think that that happens here, and I would hate to think that the stick had had some involvement, but it probably did. I’m glad at least that I didn’t have to witness it.
On a lighter note, in my second class a student told me that God would probably kill me. Today I was teaching the use of the present simple to talk about daily routines, and I started off by talking a little bit about my daily routine in Canada. When I had finished, I asked if they had any questions for me. There was a short pause before one slim girl in the front row put her and up and said, “You don’t pray?” I explained that in Canada, some people pray every day and some people don’t, and that I was one of those who don’t. This shocked a lot of the students.
She looked up, smiled a little, and then said, “God might kill you.” She wasn’t damning me or anything like that. She laughed, I laughed, and then the class laughed. It was just a funny situation, and definitely a teachable moment about religion in culture.
I am now in possession of a syllabus for Form I-IV English. It’s a booklet in chart format that is basically a simplified version of the curriculum. It is created by the Ministry of Education to help teachers plan their courses, and is likely a quite necessary tool since a great number of them are like the English teachers at my school – nothing more than high school graduates with no education training whatsoever. The chart format has a lot of the headings that we would be familiar with: objectives, structure, outcome expectations, teaching strategies, assessment strategies, expected periods per topic, etc. Despite that, however, the actual content listed under those headings is extremely rudimentary and of very little value. Still, it probably helps a little in setting the teachers who have no clue on the right track.
In any case, it will at least give me a little bit of an idea of what I should be teaching the kids, which is more than what the teachers have been doing!
Tuesday, May 6, 2008
English can be fun - just follow the damn rules!!!
Day 7 – May 6
Today was probably the most uneventful day at school thus far, but in reality that’s a good thing because it means (a) I am getting accustomed to the school and its environment and (b) that I have gotten into a regular teaching groove. I taught 3 periods today, one single and one double period with the Form Is. In the morning I got a bit of a look at the syllabus for Form I and was able to decide what I will do this week and next week. This week, we will study the present simple and its use to discuss personal routines, and next week I will teach them how to properly use dictionaries. This fits in particularly well since it was just today that we were able to bring to school all the dictionaries purchased with the donations I collected in Canada. Up to this point, they haven’t really had any dictionary access whatsoever.
In my double period with Form 1B today, I played little game using the blackboard and with students in teams. It was fun, but it got a little out of hand as the students got so excited that they would not follow my rule of one person from each team at the board at any one time. Even after I stopped them and repeated the instructions, they continued to crowd the board, writing madly. Good enthusiasm for English is one way of looking at it, I guess.
I don’t think the kids are used to having that much excitement in English class (or any class for that matter). Teaching here, from what I’ve seen, is strictly teacher centred lecture method, and its monotony is compounded by the complete absence of any resources, paper or otherwise. As the students have no textbooks and no handouts can be made, ALL information must be written on the board by the teacher and then copied by the students. They’ve got nothing else to go on. The same goes for all exercises.
Anyway, I paid a little price for bringing excitement like that into the classroom. After the game, I still had the second half of my lesson to go, but the students seemed no longer content with just a lesson. They shut down a bit. We’ll see how things continue tomorrow. Another thing I’ll have to work on is getting answers out of more than the regular 3 or 4 students that are answering. The B class is much better than the A class for this, but it still is a problem in both classes.
Another challenge is getting the students to do the work if they don’t want to. I’m a foreign teacher that has parachuted in for a few weeks. I likely have little authority in the minds of the students, and as I don’t know the system, I don’t really know the discipline methods used, either. As I’m only teaching the Form I class for two weeks, what weight can any discipline really have anyway? Not knowing the assessment strategies or timetables is also a bit tricky. I don’t know if any kind of summative assessment will figure into the two weeks that I teach each of the forms, but I will have to discuss that with the regular teachers.
A very positive sticky note to add here is that just after the morning assembly in the courtyard, the clouds over Mt. Kilimanjaro parted and a good chunk of the mountain as well as the summit was visible. It looks rocky and snowy and it looms over the whole north-western skyline. It is a shame we don’t get to see it more, as it is a breathtaking backdrop to this already stunning countryside scenery.
By the end of the school day at 2:20, I wasn’t so much exhausted as I was starving. Classes start here at 8:00am and aside from a 20 minute break at 11:20, they run straight until 2:20 with no lunch period! At 2:20, the students get a meagre school lunch, but the teachers don’t. And it’s not like there’s a cafeteria or a coffee shop around the corner. Even leaving at 2:20 doesn’t get me home until 3:30 or so, and that makes 8½ hours without a meal! How the teachers do it every day, I have no idea.
Today was probably the most uneventful day at school thus far, but in reality that’s a good thing because it means (a) I am getting accustomed to the school and its environment and (b) that I have gotten into a regular teaching groove. I taught 3 periods today, one single and one double period with the Form Is. In the morning I got a bit of a look at the syllabus for Form I and was able to decide what I will do this week and next week. This week, we will study the present simple and its use to discuss personal routines, and next week I will teach them how to properly use dictionaries. This fits in particularly well since it was just today that we were able to bring to school all the dictionaries purchased with the donations I collected in Canada. Up to this point, they haven’t really had any dictionary access whatsoever.
In my double period with Form 1B today, I played little game using the blackboard and with students in teams. It was fun, but it got a little out of hand as the students got so excited that they would not follow my rule of one person from each team at the board at any one time. Even after I stopped them and repeated the instructions, they continued to crowd the board, writing madly. Good enthusiasm for English is one way of looking at it, I guess.
I don’t think the kids are used to having that much excitement in English class (or any class for that matter). Teaching here, from what I’ve seen, is strictly teacher centred lecture method, and its monotony is compounded by the complete absence of any resources, paper or otherwise. As the students have no textbooks and no handouts can be made, ALL information must be written on the board by the teacher and then copied by the students. They’ve got nothing else to go on. The same goes for all exercises.
Anyway, I paid a little price for bringing excitement like that into the classroom. After the game, I still had the second half of my lesson to go, but the students seemed no longer content with just a lesson. They shut down a bit. We’ll see how things continue tomorrow. Another thing I’ll have to work on is getting answers out of more than the regular 3 or 4 students that are answering. The B class is much better than the A class for this, but it still is a problem in both classes.
Another challenge is getting the students to do the work if they don’t want to. I’m a foreign teacher that has parachuted in for a few weeks. I likely have little authority in the minds of the students, and as I don’t know the system, I don’t really know the discipline methods used, either. As I’m only teaching the Form I class for two weeks, what weight can any discipline really have anyway? Not knowing the assessment strategies or timetables is also a bit tricky. I don’t know if any kind of summative assessment will figure into the two weeks that I teach each of the forms, but I will have to discuss that with the regular teachers.
A very positive sticky note to add here is that just after the morning assembly in the courtyard, the clouds over Mt. Kilimanjaro parted and a good chunk of the mountain as well as the summit was visible. It looks rocky and snowy and it looms over the whole north-western skyline. It is a shame we don’t get to see it more, as it is a breathtaking backdrop to this already stunning countryside scenery.
By the end of the school day at 2:20, I wasn’t so much exhausted as I was starving. Classes start here at 8:00am and aside from a 20 minute break at 11:20, they run straight until 2:20 with no lunch period! At 2:20, the students get a meagre school lunch, but the teachers don’t. And it’s not like there’s a cafeteria or a coffee shop around the corner. Even leaving at 2:20 doesn’t get me home until 3:30 or so, and that makes 8½ hours without a meal! How the teachers do it every day, I have no idea.
Monday, May 5, 2008
Finally teaching
Day 6 – May 5
Today I finally got to teach some classes. The Form I English teacher, who had told me on Friday that she would tell me on Monday what I should teach (so much for preparation) did not show up for the start of classes, so I just went on my own with Friday’s “Teach verbs” lingering in my head.
The students greeted me and I started with a self-introduction, talking about Canada and its difference in size and population from Tanzania. Whereas in Japan the sheer size of Canada compared to Japan wowed the students, here it didn’t produce much of a reaction. I continued on, talking about my family. They were taken aback when they found out my mother is older than my father, but the big winner on the day was the fact that my brothers and I are all one year apart. I guess this is not the norm here. While the students were all attentive, some never put up their hand to guess at answers, while others did so for every question. In that respect, it wasn’t entirely different from teaching in Canada.
I continued on with the English lesson but it quickly became clear that no one had any idea what a verb was, or at least how to define it. Falling back on nouns, I didn’t have much success with that either, so I decided to spend the lesson reviewing exactly what nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs are. Again, they were quite attentive and by the end of the double period I felt we had made some progress. Not sure if any of it is part of their curriculum, but it can’t hurt.
Immediate following was another double period with the other Form I class. I began as before, but when one of the students at the back “guessed” the breadth of Canada from coast to coast on the first try, I had a feeling something was amiss. I let it go, but when the same student came up with the exact population of Canada, I finally recognized that he was the same student that had been sitting in the back row of the previous class, and I called him on it. Yep, he had been to both classes. Ah well, can’t fault the kid for loving English, but I told him he couldn’t reply anymore, and that from today onwards, he had better stick to the class to which he is assigned.
At break time today (after 5th period), I brought out the Frisbee that I had brought from home. It was an instant hit as almost all the students gathered around and watched as another teacher and I threw it about. It wasn’t long before they wanted in, so everyone had a go at throwing it, and it was uproarious laughter every time a student’s throw went awry. Standing in crowds like that, it was a bit dangerous, as on occasion the throws winged immediately right or left. Fortunately only twice did another student get a Frisbee in the face, and there were no injuries. I am hoping that the Frisbee (and the soccer balls that I presented the other day) will help to break the ice with the students, not only outside the classroom, but also inside it. With any luck, I will see the effects of that tomorrow.
After break I was caught off-guard when the form two teacher summoned me to go with her to class. There must have been some misunderstanding with what we had discussed last week, but I had no great objections with going to observe another class. However, it didn’t work out that way. About 10 minutes into her 80 minute lesson on shopping, she called to me from the front of the class, “Mr. Chris, would you like to continue the lesson?”
“Uh…..huh?” I stammered. But she came back and handed me the chalk and I tried to think of things as I slowly walked to the front of the class. Each English teacher has now done this to me once. I led the class in a little exercise on making comparisons and while they were writing a few sentences, I went to the back to clarify things with the teacher. I asked her if what I had done was sufficient and if she had material to continue the lesson, to which she replied that she had.
So after taking up the exercise, I once again took my seat at the back of the class and proceeded to witness a horrid disaster. The teacher went up to the class, looked for a little while in her book, and then started going off about the negative form, writing random sentences on the board and randomly asking students to put them into the negative. There was absolutely no connection to the previous part of the lesson and no particular merit in what she was doing, but what was worse, was that she was teaching the students that “I didn’t ate” was the negative form of “I ate”. Furthermore, when a student gave the answer “I didn’t walk” to “I walk,” she told her she was wrong and made her repeat “I didn’t walked.” I was mortified and really wanted to correct things, but there was no opportunity to do it discreetly and correcting as big an error as that in front of the entire class (and a native speaker correcting the regular teacher to boot) would not have been good for either the teacher’s confidence or the student’s confidence and respect in the teacher, so I held my breath (it was difficult).
She moved from there to switching random sentences to the present continuous, even if the resulting sentence was not at all proper English. When she had run out of random sentences, she proceeded to have the students read the questions and answers to an exercise in their notebooks that she had already corrected and handed back. It was all extremely painful to watch, and I was thankful when the bell was mercifully rung.
It is such a dilemma for headmasters and the school system in general to hire unqualified teachers (basically just Form VI graduates). The need someone to “teach” the subjects to the students, but you have to wonder if it is really benefitting them at all. This teacher, despite being in the school for months called everyone by the name “YOU!” and even tossed chalk at a student to get her attention! If a student answered wrong, she would just shake her head and say, “No, sit down!”
Apparently, only three teachers at the school, including the headmaster, are qualified teachers (they have passed the two year diploma course at college). The difference in quality of teaching, ethics of teaching, and professionalism is very, very evident.
Once again after that class, a good chunk of the teachers were milling about and talking in the staff room while the timetable showed a full schedule. I still can’t figure that out, but it’ll have to be left for another day.
Today I finally got to teach some classes. The Form I English teacher, who had told me on Friday that she would tell me on Monday what I should teach (so much for preparation) did not show up for the start of classes, so I just went on my own with Friday’s “Teach verbs” lingering in my head.
The students greeted me and I started with a self-introduction, talking about Canada and its difference in size and population from Tanzania. Whereas in Japan the sheer size of Canada compared to Japan wowed the students, here it didn’t produce much of a reaction. I continued on, talking about my family. They were taken aback when they found out my mother is older than my father, but the big winner on the day was the fact that my brothers and I are all one year apart. I guess this is not the norm here. While the students were all attentive, some never put up their hand to guess at answers, while others did so for every question. In that respect, it wasn’t entirely different from teaching in Canada.
I continued on with the English lesson but it quickly became clear that no one had any idea what a verb was, or at least how to define it. Falling back on nouns, I didn’t have much success with that either, so I decided to spend the lesson reviewing exactly what nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs are. Again, they were quite attentive and by the end of the double period I felt we had made some progress. Not sure if any of it is part of their curriculum, but it can’t hurt.
Immediate following was another double period with the other Form I class. I began as before, but when one of the students at the back “guessed” the breadth of Canada from coast to coast on the first try, I had a feeling something was amiss. I let it go, but when the same student came up with the exact population of Canada, I finally recognized that he was the same student that had been sitting in the back row of the previous class, and I called him on it. Yep, he had been to both classes. Ah well, can’t fault the kid for loving English, but I told him he couldn’t reply anymore, and that from today onwards, he had better stick to the class to which he is assigned.
At break time today (after 5th period), I brought out the Frisbee that I had brought from home. It was an instant hit as almost all the students gathered around and watched as another teacher and I threw it about. It wasn’t long before they wanted in, so everyone had a go at throwing it, and it was uproarious laughter every time a student’s throw went awry. Standing in crowds like that, it was a bit dangerous, as on occasion the throws winged immediately right or left. Fortunately only twice did another student get a Frisbee in the face, and there were no injuries. I am hoping that the Frisbee (and the soccer balls that I presented the other day) will help to break the ice with the students, not only outside the classroom, but also inside it. With any luck, I will see the effects of that tomorrow.
After break I was caught off-guard when the form two teacher summoned me to go with her to class. There must have been some misunderstanding with what we had discussed last week, but I had no great objections with going to observe another class. However, it didn’t work out that way. About 10 minutes into her 80 minute lesson on shopping, she called to me from the front of the class, “Mr. Chris, would you like to continue the lesson?”
“Uh…..huh?” I stammered. But she came back and handed me the chalk and I tried to think of things as I slowly walked to the front of the class. Each English teacher has now done this to me once. I led the class in a little exercise on making comparisons and while they were writing a few sentences, I went to the back to clarify things with the teacher. I asked her if what I had done was sufficient and if she had material to continue the lesson, to which she replied that she had.
So after taking up the exercise, I once again took my seat at the back of the class and proceeded to witness a horrid disaster. The teacher went up to the class, looked for a little while in her book, and then started going off about the negative form, writing random sentences on the board and randomly asking students to put them into the negative. There was absolutely no connection to the previous part of the lesson and no particular merit in what she was doing, but what was worse, was that she was teaching the students that “I didn’t ate” was the negative form of “I ate”. Furthermore, when a student gave the answer “I didn’t walk” to “I walk,” she told her she was wrong and made her repeat “I didn’t walked.” I was mortified and really wanted to correct things, but there was no opportunity to do it discreetly and correcting as big an error as that in front of the entire class (and a native speaker correcting the regular teacher to boot) would not have been good for either the teacher’s confidence or the student’s confidence and respect in the teacher, so I held my breath (it was difficult).
She moved from there to switching random sentences to the present continuous, even if the resulting sentence was not at all proper English. When she had run out of random sentences, she proceeded to have the students read the questions and answers to an exercise in their notebooks that she had already corrected and handed back. It was all extremely painful to watch, and I was thankful when the bell was mercifully rung.
It is such a dilemma for headmasters and the school system in general to hire unqualified teachers (basically just Form VI graduates). The need someone to “teach” the subjects to the students, but you have to wonder if it is really benefitting them at all. This teacher, despite being in the school for months called everyone by the name “YOU!” and even tossed chalk at a student to get her attention! If a student answered wrong, she would just shake her head and say, “No, sit down!”
Apparently, only three teachers at the school, including the headmaster, are qualified teachers (they have passed the two year diploma course at college). The difference in quality of teaching, ethics of teaching, and professionalism is very, very evident.
Once again after that class, a good chunk of the teachers were milling about and talking in the staff room while the timetable showed a full schedule. I still can’t figure that out, but it’ll have to be left for another day.
Friday, May 2, 2008
Pressed into action
Day 5 – May 2
We arrived at school quite early today owing to the fact that it hadn’t rained in the past 36 hours and so the roads were in quite good condition. A sign of this, the bus we normally ride was able to take us all the way up the road, nearly to the entrance of the school.
It was good to see on my arrival that a few of the teachers were already there. The headmaster and I inflated the two soccer balls that I brought with me and we presented these to the students at the morning assembly in the school yard. It was great to hear their gasps of excitement and see their smiles as they saw me approach with the balls in my hands. We had a brief ceremony where I handed the balls to the sports prefect. Hopefully from next week, if the rains continue to decrease, they will be able to use them after school in the school yard.
Classes started on time today in general, though one of the English teachers was late. We have decided that I will spend the first two weeks with the Form I classes and the last two weeks with the Form II classes. Unfortunately on this day the Form I English teacher, who was present, had no classes until the afternoon, when I was scheduled to head into town to send my report to OISE, and the Form II teacher had not shown up for first period. She did arrive, however, halfway through, and so I went with her to observe her class, a double period from 8:00 (we started at 8:20) to 9:20.
The classroom was a little brighter than the previous day, but it was clear by the noise emanating from the other half of the building that the teacher wasn’t present in that class, and as a result the student chatter echoing off the aluminium roof and brick walls was making hearing the teacher and the students difficult.
The topic of the lesson was shopping. As the teacher later explained to me, in earlier lessons she had given the students notes on shopping vocabulary and shopping English. Today, she started by asking the students review questions about the nature of shopping. After a couple of minutes, the board looked like this:
Shooping
Is a place where can buy it’s goods
Hmm… not a great start, although what she said and what she wrote were two different things and the former was markedly more correct. The answers from the students were also amusing. When asked for examples of the language of the market, we heard responses such as, “One fish!” and “Welcome, welcome, shoes!”
The children were participating quite a bit in answering the questions, though the teacher was often choosing two or three of the same, stronger students (much to their dismay) perhaps because I was in class. It was good to see that at some point she encouraged the girls to answer more, although the teacher was saying “yes” to every answer, right or wrong and whether she actually heard it or not. Despite her effort, the overall impression was of someone who lacked proper training, which isn’t surprising because that is exactly the case.
After her warm-up, she proceeded to write an exercise on the board which consisted of 15 lines of dialogue between a trader and a customer at a market which the students then had to put in order. As the students don’t have textbooks, the teacher first had to write all the lines out on the board (which took a significant amount of time) that the students then had to copy in their notebooks before working on the actual exercise. The teacher circulated to check that the students were working, but every now and then would bark out a perfunctory “Hurry Up!” addressed to no one in particular.
About 20 minutes before the end of class, she surprised me by asking me to take up the answers. I was taken a bit by surprise by this, had no copy of my own, and had a lot of difficulty reading the weak chalk on the foggy blackboards. She gave me her text and I proceeded to piece things together but the exercise was strange (despite being from an ESL text from Scotland), and I was unable to figure out the right order before the end of class. The students were happy to have had me though, and welcomed me back for the next time.
Returning to the staff room, the headmaster called me into his office, where he was discussing with the carpenter and his assistant the furniture that would be made for the school using the donations that I had brought. They had already worked out some needs and prices and I was happy to see that it was within the limits of the remaining donations. It is a good mix of classroom furniture that will directly benefit the students and office furniture that will give the teachers a more appropriate workspace (in order to keep them better motivated and allow them to do their jobs better). In all, we have decided on the following:
· 15 student desks, so that each student will have their own (some students currently squeeze side by side into one.
· 6 small shelves on which we will be able to put the dictionaries brought for each class.
· 5 work tables for the staffroom (currently some teachers squeeze themselves into student desk-chair combos.
· 10 sturdy chairs to go with the tables.
· 1 large shelf where teachers can keep student books and other resources.
· 1 large lockable cabinet where the headmaster can keep student and school records and other valuable resources.
This furniture will complement the books and other resources that I have brought using some of the donation money. Prior to my arrival, the headmaster had told me that the school had just one dictionary for all 240 students. What I have brought includes:
· A set for each class consisting of:
- a large hardcover English dictionary
- a medium paperback English dictionary
- a medium paperback English dictionary/thesaurus
- a comprehensive English-Swahili/Swahili-English dictionary
- a world atlas
- a laminated world wall map
- a laminated wall map of Africa
- a laminated wall chart of the periodic table of elements
· numerous other science and geography wall charts
After checking the design of the shelves and locking cabinet at the neighbouring, more developed high school, we returned to Mangi Sabas and finalized the agreement. The carpenter will deliver the furniture in small bunches and so we should be able to see steady progress. In addition, he will aim to have everything done before my departure at the end of May.
The school runs on a system of nine 40-minute periods a day. Classes run with from 8:00 to 11:20 (5 periods), at which time there is a 20 minute break. They then resume at 11:40 and continue to 2:20 (4 periods), when the school day finishes and students clean the school and have lunch (provide). Some of these are combined to make double periods. In any case, there is no time in between periods (literally, zero minutes), but that doesn’t mean that teachers rush here and there for class; quite the contrary in fact.
As a case in point, when we returned to the school, it was just after 10:00am. According to the timetable, this was 4th period, yet all the teachers were in the staffroom at their tables, either chatting or doing other work. I was completely confused, but given what I had seen over the past couple of days, not entirely surprised. The students were left to their own devices (in theory, when the teacher is not in class, they are supposed to be doing “personal study,” but we all know what happens when the cat is away.) When I asked the headmaster why none of the teachers were in class, he didn’t have an immediate reply. Later in the day, however, he explained to me that the teachers were finishing preparing the exams, which were now overdue to be submitted to the regional office for verification.
I ended up observing one more Form II English class (the teacher had modified her lesson to exclude the exercise but instead simply went around the class one by one asking each student to describe their local market while the other students listened, bored out of their minds.)
In the last period I observed before leaving for town, the Form I teacher, making use of a scheduled private study period to make up for missed English classes, started apathetically into a lesson on English noun plurals. The students seemed to know all the answers to all her questions, but she continued putting random examples on the board in between consulting her book and staring distractedly out the window. I was amazed at the student participation despite the clear disinterest of the teacher. About 15 minutes into the 40-minute lesson, after exhausting all her examples, she turned to me and said, “Mr. Chris, do you have anything that you can add to this topic?”
I was completely caught off-guard and offered a hesitant “yes” as I rose from my seat and walked slowly to the front of the class, thinking of what I could add to a topic that the students obviously knew inside out. I put on my game face and turned around and launched into a mini-lesson on the rule regarding the y to ies change. After that, I stumbled through a few other irregular plural examples, almost all of which the students already knew, before finishing up. There were 5 minutes left in the period.
At 12:20, I left with the two English teachers and one other teacher. I was going to submit my report via internet in town and the others were going home, although why I don’t know; there were still 3 periods left in the day. This is one of the things I still can’t quite figure out: why teachers are rarely where their supposed to be, but it’s hard to question too directly without sounding critical or reproachful. As we walked, I asked the Form I English teacher about what she would like me to teach on Monday. She answered that she would tell me on Monday morning. I asked for a little more clarification so that I could prepare. She hesitated, but then finally just said, “Verbs.” That kind of leaves me with little to go on, but I’m not especially surprised because I don’t get the impression that much preparation goes into any of her lessons.
So that is all I have to go on for Monday’s classes. I’ll do my best!
We arrived at school quite early today owing to the fact that it hadn’t rained in the past 36 hours and so the roads were in quite good condition. A sign of this, the bus we normally ride was able to take us all the way up the road, nearly to the entrance of the school.
It was good to see on my arrival that a few of the teachers were already there. The headmaster and I inflated the two soccer balls that I brought with me and we presented these to the students at the morning assembly in the school yard. It was great to hear their gasps of excitement and see their smiles as they saw me approach with the balls in my hands. We had a brief ceremony where I handed the balls to the sports prefect. Hopefully from next week, if the rains continue to decrease, they will be able to use them after school in the school yard.
Classes started on time today in general, though one of the English teachers was late. We have decided that I will spend the first two weeks with the Form I classes and the last two weeks with the Form II classes. Unfortunately on this day the Form I English teacher, who was present, had no classes until the afternoon, when I was scheduled to head into town to send my report to OISE, and the Form II teacher had not shown up for first period. She did arrive, however, halfway through, and so I went with her to observe her class, a double period from 8:00 (we started at 8:20) to 9:20.
The classroom was a little brighter than the previous day, but it was clear by the noise emanating from the other half of the building that the teacher wasn’t present in that class, and as a result the student chatter echoing off the aluminium roof and brick walls was making hearing the teacher and the students difficult.
The topic of the lesson was shopping. As the teacher later explained to me, in earlier lessons she had given the students notes on shopping vocabulary and shopping English. Today, she started by asking the students review questions about the nature of shopping. After a couple of minutes, the board looked like this:
Shooping
Is a place where can buy it’s goods
Hmm… not a great start, although what she said and what she wrote were two different things and the former was markedly more correct. The answers from the students were also amusing. When asked for examples of the language of the market, we heard responses such as, “One fish!” and “Welcome, welcome, shoes!”
The children were participating quite a bit in answering the questions, though the teacher was often choosing two or three of the same, stronger students (much to their dismay) perhaps because I was in class. It was good to see that at some point she encouraged the girls to answer more, although the teacher was saying “yes” to every answer, right or wrong and whether she actually heard it or not. Despite her effort, the overall impression was of someone who lacked proper training, which isn’t surprising because that is exactly the case.
After her warm-up, she proceeded to write an exercise on the board which consisted of 15 lines of dialogue between a trader and a customer at a market which the students then had to put in order. As the students don’t have textbooks, the teacher first had to write all the lines out on the board (which took a significant amount of time) that the students then had to copy in their notebooks before working on the actual exercise. The teacher circulated to check that the students were working, but every now and then would bark out a perfunctory “Hurry Up!” addressed to no one in particular.
About 20 minutes before the end of class, she surprised me by asking me to take up the answers. I was taken a bit by surprise by this, had no copy of my own, and had a lot of difficulty reading the weak chalk on the foggy blackboards. She gave me her text and I proceeded to piece things together but the exercise was strange (despite being from an ESL text from Scotland), and I was unable to figure out the right order before the end of class. The students were happy to have had me though, and welcomed me back for the next time.
Returning to the staff room, the headmaster called me into his office, where he was discussing with the carpenter and his assistant the furniture that would be made for the school using the donations that I had brought. They had already worked out some needs and prices and I was happy to see that it was within the limits of the remaining donations. It is a good mix of classroom furniture that will directly benefit the students and office furniture that will give the teachers a more appropriate workspace (in order to keep them better motivated and allow them to do their jobs better). In all, we have decided on the following:
· 15 student desks, so that each student will have their own (some students currently squeeze side by side into one.
· 6 small shelves on which we will be able to put the dictionaries brought for each class.
· 5 work tables for the staffroom (currently some teachers squeeze themselves into student desk-chair combos.
· 10 sturdy chairs to go with the tables.
· 1 large shelf where teachers can keep student books and other resources.
· 1 large lockable cabinet where the headmaster can keep student and school records and other valuable resources.
This furniture will complement the books and other resources that I have brought using some of the donation money. Prior to my arrival, the headmaster had told me that the school had just one dictionary for all 240 students. What I have brought includes:
· A set for each class consisting of:
- a large hardcover English dictionary
- a medium paperback English dictionary
- a medium paperback English dictionary/thesaurus
- a comprehensive English-Swahili/Swahili-English dictionary
- a world atlas
- a laminated world wall map
- a laminated wall map of Africa
- a laminated wall chart of the periodic table of elements
· numerous other science and geography wall charts
After checking the design of the shelves and locking cabinet at the neighbouring, more developed high school, we returned to Mangi Sabas and finalized the agreement. The carpenter will deliver the furniture in small bunches and so we should be able to see steady progress. In addition, he will aim to have everything done before my departure at the end of May.
The school runs on a system of nine 40-minute periods a day. Classes run with from 8:00 to 11:20 (5 periods), at which time there is a 20 minute break. They then resume at 11:40 and continue to 2:20 (4 periods), when the school day finishes and students clean the school and have lunch (provide). Some of these are combined to make double periods. In any case, there is no time in between periods (literally, zero minutes), but that doesn’t mean that teachers rush here and there for class; quite the contrary in fact.
As a case in point, when we returned to the school, it was just after 10:00am. According to the timetable, this was 4th period, yet all the teachers were in the staffroom at their tables, either chatting or doing other work. I was completely confused, but given what I had seen over the past couple of days, not entirely surprised. The students were left to their own devices (in theory, when the teacher is not in class, they are supposed to be doing “personal study,” but we all know what happens when the cat is away.) When I asked the headmaster why none of the teachers were in class, he didn’t have an immediate reply. Later in the day, however, he explained to me that the teachers were finishing preparing the exams, which were now overdue to be submitted to the regional office for verification.
I ended up observing one more Form II English class (the teacher had modified her lesson to exclude the exercise but instead simply went around the class one by one asking each student to describe their local market while the other students listened, bored out of their minds.)
In the last period I observed before leaving for town, the Form I teacher, making use of a scheduled private study period to make up for missed English classes, started apathetically into a lesson on English noun plurals. The students seemed to know all the answers to all her questions, but she continued putting random examples on the board in between consulting her book and staring distractedly out the window. I was amazed at the student participation despite the clear disinterest of the teacher. About 15 minutes into the 40-minute lesson, after exhausting all her examples, she turned to me and said, “Mr. Chris, do you have anything that you can add to this topic?”
I was completely caught off-guard and offered a hesitant “yes” as I rose from my seat and walked slowly to the front of the class, thinking of what I could add to a topic that the students obviously knew inside out. I put on my game face and turned around and launched into a mini-lesson on the rule regarding the y to ies change. After that, I stumbled through a few other irregular plural examples, almost all of which the students already knew, before finishing up. There were 5 minutes left in the period.
At 12:20, I left with the two English teachers and one other teacher. I was going to submit my report via internet in town and the others were going home, although why I don’t know; there were still 3 periods left in the day. This is one of the things I still can’t quite figure out: why teachers are rarely where their supposed to be, but it’s hard to question too directly without sounding critical or reproachful. As we walked, I asked the Form I English teacher about what she would like me to teach on Monday. She answered that she would tell me on Monday morning. I asked for a little more clarification so that I could prepare. She hesitated, but then finally just said, “Verbs.” That kind of leaves me with little to go on, but I’m not especially surprised because I don’t get the impression that much preparation goes into any of her lessons.
So that is all I have to go on for Monday’s classes. I’ll do my best!
Thursday, May 1, 2008
May Day
Day 4 – May 1
Today was a national holiday – Worker’s Day, or May Day, so there was no school today. Over drinks in a café in town I talked with the headmaster a little about his desire to return to the classroom, if just for one class or two, and also the benefits of group work, an approach that seems to me to be rather uncommon in teaching methodology here. Hopefully I’ll get a better glimpse of that tomorrow as I observe some of the English classes.
Today was a national holiday – Worker’s Day, or May Day, so there was no school today. Over drinks in a café in town I talked with the headmaster a little about his desire to return to the classroom, if just for one class or two, and also the benefits of group work, an approach that seems to me to be rather uncommon in teaching methodology here. Hopefully I’ll get a better glimpse of that tomorrow as I observe some of the English classes.
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